October 3, 1993

Growing Old in the 90's

By NANCY MAIRS

THE FOUNTAIN OF AGE
By Betty Friedan.

s a girl, I knew both my grandmothers and three of my great-grandmothers. In fact, two of them lived into their 80's and
one into her 90's, their longevity unusual enough to excite admiring comment from the grown-ups, though I'd pretty much taken it for granted. Today, at least a third of the people I routinely spend time with are
70 or older, often much older, and from time to time I've wondered whether I was imagining a demographic shift, perhaps because of my own advancing age, or whether growing old is no longer the rarity it once seemed.
In "The Fountain of Age," Betty Friedan draws copiously from statistics that answer my question definitively. In this century, life expectancy has grown by 30 years; between 1970 and 1985, the number of people
over 65 increased more than 35 percent; and women over 85 form the fastest-growing group of the elderly in the United States and the world. As a consequence, huge numbers of people are taking part in a social experiment
both evolutionary and revolutionary.

Who better than Betty Friedan to chronicle an adventure of such magnitude and significance? "Well, 'The Feminine Mystique' certainly changed my life," a friend recalled fervently when I told her I was reading
Ms. Friedan's new book, "and the lives of a lot of other women I know." Not to mention the lives of our husbands, lovers, daughters and sons, whether they know it or not.

"I think 'The Fountain of Age' will do the same for old people," I told my friend, using a term blunter than the one Ms. Friedan chooses. Despite her condemnation of society's dread and denial of age,
she consistently prefers "older" without specifying the terms of the comparison. Clearly, "old" is still a bit of a dirty word, as "woman" was in those days when my grandmothers tutored me
to grow up a lady.

Not that Ms. Friedan is generally mealy-mouthed. On the contrary, her forthrightness is what makes this euphemizing stand out. She began her project reluctantly, she confesses at the outset, having at 60 "no wish to wallow
personally in the dreariness of age," but in the course of (and in part because of) her study, she clearly warmed to her subject even as she began to live its realities. She shows no desire to evade issues, no matter
how delicate and difficult, speculating boldly about the impact of differences between men and women on successful aging, for example, and calling into careful question the growing attention to the "right to die."
"I am concerned," she writes, "that the 'right to die' will be seen not as an individual choice but as a socially acceptable form of euthanasia."

"The 'problem' of age" that she explores rests on a socially generated "mystique" in which age "is perceived only as decline or deterioration from youth" and its victims are "rendered
helpless, childlike and deprived of human identity or activities" so that they "don't remind us of ourselves." So pervasive is this myth that even though virtually all the old people I know are intellectually
and physically robust, I was startled to learn that of Americans over 65 today, only 5 percent suffer from Alzheimer's disease and at any one time only 5 percent are in nursing homes, fear of which so reinforces our
horror of growing old.

IN truth, "previous assumptions about age as genetically programmed catastrophic decline were based on pathological aging," predominantly in institutionalized men, and so Ms. Friedan and the "underground"
of gerontologists and health professionals on whose expertise she draws really have entered "uncharted terrain" in conceiving age as a new life stage in which further growth can occur. Several factors may have
obscured this possibility in the past: the very novelty of human longevity, disavowal of age in a society that adulates the young, and the use of research tools designed to measure youthful capabilities. But "The Fountain
of Age" enables us to view "disengagement" and "decline" anew, not as "normal aging" but as "indices of approaching death," and to get on with our various developmental tasks.

One of these, in age, appears to be "the bridging of the polarization between men and women, and between the 'masculine' and 'feminine' sides of our personhood." Aging women appear to make this
crossover more readily than men, and therefore are less often thrown into crisis by changes in life, a point that may help explain why women's life expectancy, nearly identical to that of men at the turn of the century,
now so greatly exceeds men's. Indeed, in Ms. Friedan's analysis, "disengagement from the roles and goals of youth and from activities and ties that no longer have any personal meaning may, in fact, be necessary
to make the shift to a new kind of engagement in age."

"The attempt to hold on to, or judge oneself by, youthful parameters," she says, "blinds us to the new strengths and possibilities emerging in ourselves."

In revising the image of age from a downhill slide to a strenuous, risky, but fulfilling enterprise, Ms. Friedan does not deny the difficulties we encounter along the course. At 65 or even before, we are forced into retirement,
if not by law then by social expectation, thereby depriving the work force of the particular strengths age confers and ourselves of the challenge that can keep us vital and alert for years, even decades, thereafter. Trapped
in a youthful model of sex, in particular the "preoccupation with male erection and penetration," we may fail to move on into "real intimacy," which entails sharing the "truth-telling, authentic
self" that emerges with time.

Ms. Friedan points out that what happens to us depends in large measure on our economic value. As a "boom market to take the place of our kids . . . and the receding numbers of 'young' first-home-buying families,"
we are encouraged to sequester ourselves in expensive "hard-sell retirement communities, congregate living and life care complexes." Moreover, "the sheer size of the market we represent for the sellers of
pharmaceuticals, and the practitioners of cardiac and cancer surgery and other costly high-technology medicine, is enormous -- and enormously profitable."

The sellers of such goods and services have even less motive for detaching age from illness than do the dreaders and deniers. If the paradigm is going to be shifted, those of us engaged in aging will have to do it ourselves.
Ms. Friedan is sanguine about the possibilities: new endeavors that resolve the opposition between family and career, seriousness and play, love and work; fresh, consciously created sexual and emotional bonds; housing options
that "meet the need for independence and intimacy . . . without denying the physical and economic realities of aging"; a medical model based not on "cure" but on "autonomy and control -- of one's
body, one's life, one's days."

To refuse the view of age as decline into decrepitude and instead to venture into it as into a curious new country may prove perilous. In her most engaging chapter, Ms. Friedan offers her experiences on an Outward Bound expedition
as a metaphor for the risks and rigors of adventurous aging. At least to this wheelchair-bound reader, her feats are astonishing. But faced with rappelling down a 300-foot cliff, she balks. Instead of chagrin, however,
she experiences freedom: "What a relief, at this age, finally, that I don't have to compete to prove myself -- that I can live with the fact that I'll never rappel and that failure doesn't really matter
one way or another." She has truly gone beyond "old roles and fantasies" into a world of self-defined meaning.

The reward of such a shift, a sense of connection with others and participation in the "ongoing human enterprise" that transcends death, goes beyond the "generativity" formulated by Erik Erikson, which Ms.
Friedan says is limited "by the psychoanalytic construct that ends in 'genitality': the metaphor of biological sexuality."

"Those rigidly separate sex roles of our youth" retired from, death accepted, and our past reviewed and affirmed, shortcomings and all, we can achieve true "generativity": "a stage of evolution, in
our own lives, that could also be key to the evolution and survival of our aging society." The hope that has sounded the basso continuo of the book erupts joyously at its close.

"The Fountain of Age" is not, of course, without flaws. Repetitions that grow tedious and sometimes downright irritating make it much too long. A vigilant editor might at least have spared us yet another definition
of depression as rage turned inward, on the chance -- quite likely, research indicates -- that in advancing years, our memories are still intact (though I sympathize with the daunting task of suggesting cuts to a writer
of Ms. Friedan's eminence). As delightful as some of the sources she cites are, they are too numerous. But in view of her scope, thorough research and radical vision, these are quibbles.

More seriously, as in "The Feminine Mystique," Ms. Friedan generalizes from the conditions and experiences of a predominantly white middle-class population, and the reader must take care to remember that for people
from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds aging may present altogether different challenges. Among my Latino friends, for instance, old people are far more likely to live with their grown children and grandchildren than
to buy a town house by a golf course in Sun City. Writers have spent the 30 years following "The Feminine Mystique" delineating such distinctions among women, and future writers about age will face a similar task.
But in breaking silence once again, Ms. Friedan has provided a foundation for reflection and debate.

"The Fountain of Age" chanced to reach my desk on my 50th birthday, and I can't imagine a more heartening gift for a woman of any age, certain or otherwise. Or a man, for that matter. With Ms. Friedan for a guide,
I intend, like her, "to find new adventures for my third age; and if I'm lucky, I'll die on the move, in the air, on the road." I can hardly wait to get on with it!

Nancy Mairs's most recent book is "Ordinary Time: Cycles in
Marriage, Faith, and Renewal."

SAYING NO TO THE AGE
MYSTIQUE

Life review, whether it is accomplished alone or with the help of others, is a way to say yes to our lives, and can lead us to "integrity" of self, but not, I think, to "generativity," new roles for older
people in society. That will take a lot of us saying no to the age mystique. . . . One thing is certain. We cannot even begin to help create the new patterns that are needed if we are barred in age from participating in
the institutions that carry society forward. It is only now that women are reaching critical mass in every field and institution that we can even glimpse the possibilities of style and structure, policy and practice, previously
unnamed problems and new solutions for society itself that were hidden when the very rubrics were defined solely in terms of male experience. . . .

I thought once again about evolution. This new explosion of human age has to have some function in the survival of the whole community, stretching into the future. . . . Our "legacy" has to be more than those memories
of meaning we write down for our grandchildren. . . . There will not have to be such dread and denial for them in living their age if we use our own age in new adventures, breaking the old rules and inhibitions. . . .

I began this quest with my own denial and fear of age. It ends with acceptance, affirmation and celebration. Somewhere along the way, I recognized, with relief and excitement, my liberation from the power politics of the women's
movement. I recognized my own compelling need now to transcend the war between the sexes, the no-win battles of women as a whole sex, oppressed victims, against men as a whole sex, the oppressors. . . . The unexpectedness
of this new quest has been my adventure into age.